How the settlement is calculated
Home Poker Ledger takes two numbers per player — what they put in and what they took out — and turns them into the shortest list of payments that settles the table. This page explains exactly what it does with those numbers, because a tool that handles other people's money should not be a black box.
Step one: reduce everyone to a single number
Every player's position is one figure: net = cashed out − total bought in. Buy-ins are kept as separate entries rather than a running total, so the record still shows who rebought and how often, but for settlement purposes only the sum matters.
A player who bought in twice at $20 and finished with $65 has a net of +$25. A player who bought in once and busted has −$20. Nobody's net depends on anyone else's — that is what makes the rest of this tractable.
Step two: check the books balance
In a game with no house, the money that goes in is the money that comes out. Add every net together and the total should be exactly zero. If it isn't, something is wrong with the count, and no amount of clever settlement arithmetic will fix it.
So the calculator checks this first and tells you three things: whether there is a discrepancy, which direction it runs, and how much it is. It will not quietly distribute an error and present the result as if the night reconciled.
Step three: pair the biggest winner with the biggest loser
Once the nets sum to zero, the winners are owed precisely what the losers owe. Settling is a matter of matching them up, and there are many valid ways to do it. Most are needlessly tedious — six people making six separate transfers when three would do.
The calculator uses a greedy pairing. It takes the largest amount owed and the largest amount due, and settles the smaller of the two in a single payment. That always zeroes out at least one player, so each payment removes someone from the problem entirely.
With n players, this settles the table in at most n − 1 payments, and usually fewer. A six-handed game where three people won and three lost typically resolves in three or four transfers rather than nine.
A worked example
Four players finish at +$40, +$15, −$25, −$30. The largest debt (−$30) pays the largest credit (+$40), which settles $30 and leaves that winner owed $10. Then −$25 pays the remaining $10, leaving them owing $15, which goes to the +$15 player. Three payments, four players, everyone square.
Step four: the count that doesn't reconcile
When the chips don't match the buy-ins and you have already looked for the missing entry, someone has to absorb the difference. Splitting it equally across the table punishes people who lost money already. Charging whoever miscounted assumes you know who that was.
The optional “Cover the gap from the top” setting puts it on the players who finished ahead, beginning with the biggest winner — they are the ones with winnings to give up, and a dent in a good night costs less than deepening a loss.
The rule has one refinement that matters, and it is the reason the option is worth using rather than doing it by hand. It never changes anyone's placing. If the biggest winner is far enough clear, they cover the whole gap alone. If the top two finished close, absorbing it alone would drop the leader below second place, so they split it — half each for two, thirds for three, quarters for four. The amounts move; the order does not.
When the count runs the other way and there are more chips than buy-ins, the same logic applies in reverse: the biggest loser's debt comes down first.
Rounding, and why yen and won behave differently
All arithmetic is done in the currency's smallest unit — cents for dollars, won for won — using integers, never floating point. This is not fussiness. Storing $20.10 as a decimal and adding it up sixty times produces a total that is off by a fraction of a cent, and a settlement that is off by a cent is a settlement someone will argue about.
Seven currencies are supported: KRW, USD, JPY, CNY, EUR, GBP and SGD. Won and yen have no minor unit, so the calculator shows no decimal places for them and rounds to whole units. Entering “20000” in KRW means twenty thousand won, not two hundred.
What it does not do
- It does not deal cards, run a game, or track anything during play.
- It does not move money. It tells you who should pay whom; the paying is yours.
- It does not send your numbers anywhere. There is no server — see the privacy policy for what that means in practice.
- It does not decide disputes. If the table disagrees about what happened, that is a conversation, not a calculation.
Every rule above is covered by an automated test suite of several hundred cases, including randomised tables checked to settle exactly and never to change anyone's placing. The arithmetic is not trusted because we say so; it is checked on every change.